1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus for managing a system configuration by using a radio frequency identification tag attached to a constituent component of an information processing system or the like.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recent years have witnessed systematic approaches to improving support operations for information processing systems, but many parts of the support operations still require manually operated maintenance services when an abnormality occurs, which results in the following problems:
(1) A field engineer (FE) who maintains software and hardware at a customer site is required to confirm information of hardware components constituting a system one piece at a time and to then integrate it.
(2) Consistency between components, or between a component and a system, cannot be checked.
(3) The number of error occurrences for a component cannot be recorded. That is, the history of an error cannot be grasped.
(4) A component code for identifying a component on some replacement component cannot be verified when ordering the replacement component, possibly resulting in the obtainment of a different component.
(5) A physical failure point is first identified by an alarm or the like when an FE arrives at a customer's site and turns on the power of a system.
A prior patent application to the present invention, Japanese patent application No. 2004-170744, has disclosed, as a countermeasure, a method of attaching to each component a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag that includes version information of each component equipped in a server chassis, and that collects the information when the chassis is opened, thereby obtaining information of each of the components all at once.
A server system, however, includes a vast number of components and some components may be replaced at the discretion of a user. Therefore, it is difficult for an FE to discern the location of a failure in a system in which a failure has occurred.
Patent document 1 relates to a quality control method in which a product is shipped with an attached information recording medium such as a barcode label or the like that records the contents of the product, and patent document 2 relates to a management method that carries out an implementation check of hardware by comparing specific information such as a version number written in a storage unit of the hardware with specific information stored in a management apparatus.
Patent document 1: Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2003-233652
Patent document 2: Japanese Patent Application Publication No. H07-219806